Word: geneticist
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Proof at the genetic level that origin means more than location is coming in. Researchers at Stanford have been studying liver, breast, prostate and lung cancers for clues to their telltale molecular fingerprints. Using microarrays to sense which genes are turned on in sample tissues, says geneticist Charles Perou, the Stanford team has discovered that most of the genes expressed by both normal breast cells and primary-breast-cancer cells are similar, and so are cells for normal lung tissue and lung cancer, normal prostate and prostate cancer, and so on--which should ultimately give doctors biochemical identifiers to guide...
...supersalmon escaped into the wild. One of the few studies done by U.S. researchers found a lower survival rate for eggs produced by transgenic fish. Still other studies show that despite their name, so-called superfish have diminished muscle structure and swimming performance. Says Canadian fish geneticist Robert Devlin: "Science, at the moment, is unable to give us a reliable assessment of risk...
Once scientists succeed, the possibilities for comedic breeding are unlimited. By scraping cells from the fingernail of Lucille Ball, say, and from one of Ed Asner's eyebrows, a geneticist would have the tools necessary to fertilize the embryo of a child with specific kinds of comedic potential. Though testing so far has only been done on pigs--not a legitimate gauge, since it is hard to distinguish their laugh from an oink-snort--results are promising. Some studios and networks are toying with the idea of "development nurseries" that would venture to create the optimal candidates for sitcom stardom...
Craig Venter has no shortage of rivals who would love to see him fail--especially among scientists at the Human Genome Project, the multibillion-dollar government-sponsored effort to map every one of our 100,000 genes. When the millionaire molecular geneticist announced in 1998 that his company, Celera Genomics, would do the job in a third of the time at no cost to the taxpayer (thereby making the Genome Project seem like a wasted effort), the scientific community was split into two camps--one group of researchers hoping he could make good on his promise, the other predicting...
Germ-line genetic engineering was first performed successfully on animals and plants in the 1980s. By the end of the 2nd millennium, no geneticist doubted the potential for applying the technology to humans as well. But at that time, scientific understanding of human genes was still fragmentary...